by Daniel Quinn
“You mean … he’s actually with David?”
“That’s the way it looks.”
“But where were they going?”
“Well, you have to understand that the officer didn’t know either one of them was missing. He only stopped them because he thought it was a little strange for a boy of Tim’s age to be coming out of a bar at midnight.”
“What did he say?”
“What did who say?”
“My husband.”
“He said he’d just gone into the bar to find a friend who wasn’t there, so he left.”
Ellen shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yes, well, not on the face of it. But you’ve got to realize that, if it was your husband, he probably wouldn’t be in a mood to share his life story with some nosy cop. Like most people, his first idea would be to come up with a plausible tale that would make him go away. That’s why the officer talked to the boy separately.”
“And what did he say?”
Wiley hesitated. “Mrs. Kennesey, I’m not going to pretend that a great piece of police work was done here. In these circumstances, I might have been more curious than this particular officer was, but then again I might not have been. All he was trying to find out was whether some kind of funny business was going on there. He asked the boy how long they’d been in the bar, and he confirmed that it had just been a couple of minutes. He asked if the man was his father and he said he was. According to the officer, he was very definite about it.”
“But you’re not sure it was Tim.”
“No, ma’am. But the man, the boy, and the car all fit the descriptions you gave us, and they were outside a bar that was once part of the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Frankly, I’d be amazed to find out it wasn’t them.”
Ellen spent a few moments trying to digest this. “So what would you do if you were me?”
“Have you called home this morning?”
“No.”
“Then that’s what I’d do.”
“And if they’re not there?”
“Then I’d go home and wait for them.”
“And then? What if they don’t come home?”
Sergeant Wiley stifled a sigh. “Look, Mrs. Kennesey, we’ve got to take this one step at a time. Go home, see what happens, and we’ll carry on from there. All right?”
“Yes, I guess so. All right.” She hung up, dialed the number at home, and let it ring for a full minute before hanging up. Her hand still resting on the phone, she gazed dully into the seascape on the wall, with its storm-tossed sailing ship, and tried to decide what to do next. She checked her watch: ten-thirty. She dressed, had breakfast at the motel coffee shop, and drove to Bryn Mawr. By then it was eleven thirty, but the Yacht Club wasn’t open.
She drove back to Runnell and was mildly surprised to find the house still standing, still looking prim and safe and ordinary. She put the dinner dishes in the dishwasher, dug out some snapshots of David and Tim, packed a bag (to be on the safe side), and left a prominent note on the refrigerator:
Tim/David—
I hope to hell one of you (or preferably both of you) are here to read this note. If you are, for God’s sake, stay here. I should be back by eight or nine tonight. Notice that I don’t say where I’m going. If I did, sure as hell, you’d come looking for me and the whole thing would start all over again.
STAY HERE!!!
Ellen
Then she went to the bank and withdrew a thousand dollars. While she was pulling out of the parking lot to return to Chicago, Tim and Howard were entering the house she’d left just minutes before. As they walked into the kitchen, the dishwasher completed its final rinse cycle and clicked off. They stared at it incredulously and shook their heads at how narrowly they’d missed her.
“We might be able to catch her before she gets out of town,” Tim suggested.
Howard shook his head firmly. “No, your mother’s right. This comedy of errors has got to stop. No more chasing around after each other. You stay right here. Don’t even poke your nose out the door.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want me to stick around till she gets back?”
“No, I’ll be all right.”
Howard dug a card out of his jacket pocket and handed it to him. “You give me a call when she gets here, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.”
He turned to leave and then paused, frowning. “Tim, I want you to make me a promise. A solemn promise.” The boy shrugged. “Okay.”
“Under no circumstances—no matter who calls or what happens—are you to leave this house without calling me first. Understand?”
“I understand.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“To do what?”
“Not to leave the house without calling you first.”
Howard nodded and went out to his rented car.
CHAPTER 20
As Ellen approached the entrance to the Yacht Club, a car door opened beside her and a man stepped out onto the sidewalk.
“Mrs. Kennesey?”
She turned and stared at him curiously. He was dressed in grubby house-painter’s coveralls and had a ferret’s face that was surmounted by a thatch of coarse red hair.
“Yes?”
“Detective Wolf, ma’am. Chicago Police.”
She looked at him and at the car, a battered sedan from the 1970s. “I don’t believe it,” she said.
His thin smile was unpleasantly like a sneer. “You can’t always go by appearances, Mrs. K. This is my partner, Detective Goodman.” The door on the driver’s side opened and a bulky, putty-faced man with close-cropped gray hair got out and nodded across the roof of the car. He too was dressed in coveralls.
“What do you want?” Ellen asked him.
“To talk to you, Mrs. Kennesey,” the putty-faced man said. “Obviously.” He had a voice like gravel flowing down a tin chute. “About what?”
“About your husband and your son, what else?”
She looked from one to the other and said, “I’d like to see some identification.”
Wolf laughed: a harsh gust of air through his nose.
“Lady, working undercover, we don’t carry identification.”
“I don’t understand. What do my husband and my son have to do with your undercover work?”
“Not a goddamn thing, Mrs. K,” Wolf said. “Look, we’re just here to give you a message. If you don’t want it, we’ll be on our way.”
“A message?”
He nodded.
“From whom?”
“From the sergeant. Something came in this morning he thought you might be interested in.”
“Go on.”
“How ’bout we talk in the car, Mrs. K? Much more comfortable.”
She looked at the car again and shook her head.
“Okay, lady, suit yourself.” He leaned back against it and folded his arms. “Around eleven this morning, one of the maids out at the O’Hare Holiday Inn goes into a room and finds a note under a pillow that reads, ‘Please call my mother.’ She turns the note in to her supervisor, who turns it in to her supervisor, and finally it gets to the day manager, who looks up the records for the room and calls us, just to keep his ass protected. The room was taken last night about one A.M., for one night only, by a Mr. David Kennedy, who is some kind of a joker. He lists his home address as Backhome, Indiana. He drives a Volvo, but the license number don’t match your husband’s. He pays for the room in advance, in cash, and asks the room clerk to make a reservation for tomorrow—that’d be today—at the Inn in Omaha.”
Wolf smirked at her, one eye half closed.
“Did you say Kennedy?”
“Yup.”
Ellen paused, blinking down at the sidewalk. “And you think this was my husband?”
“Nope.”
She looked up, astonished. “You don’t?”
“We’re just messenger boys here, Mrs. K. The sergeant says, keep an eye on th
e Yacht Club and if the lady shows up, pass this on. He don’t tell us to think.”
“I see.” She looked uneasily from one to the other. “I’m sorry. I guess I’ve been pretty rude.”
“Gotta be rude to somebody,” he observed cryptically.
“The note said, ‘Please call my mother’? Nothing else?”
“Nope.”
“Can I see it?”
“Sure. Why not?”
She looked at them expectantly. They stared back at her with vacant eyes. “Well? Where is it?”
“Out at the Holiday Inn, I suppose. If they kept it.”
“You didn’t tell them to keep it?” Wolf treated her to another snorting laugh. “Lady, I didn’t tell nobody nothin’. I’m just passin’ on a message.”
Ellen sighed in frustration. “Look, I seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot with you. Let’s start over, okay?”
He shrugged indifferently. “What’s on your mind?”
“I’d like you to help me with this.”
“Go on.”
“What did this David Kennedy look like?”
“Jesus, lady.” He shook his head in disgust. “Somebody finds a note that says ‘Please call my mother,’ do you think we mobilize the National Guard to look into it? Ordinarily the dispatcher just says, ‘Yeah, that’s swell, thanks for calling,’ and forgets about it. It was just a fluke that the sergeant heard about it at all.”
“You mean nobody cares?”
“Cares about what, for Christ’s sake? The note don’t say ‘I’m being held prisoner.’ The note don’t say ‘I’m being kidnaped.’ It says ‘Call my mom,’ for Christ’s sake. What are we supposed to do about that? Seal off the city? Declare a national emergency?”
Ellen looked helplessly at the other detective, who folded his arms across the car roof, rested his chin on them, and gazed at her without expression. She pressed her eyes shut for a long moment.
“Mr. Wolf, you’re a difficult man.”
“You want to report me? You want my badge number?”
“No, I don’t want your badge number. I just want you to help me a little bit. I’m in trouble and I need some help.”
Wolf’s pinched features worked for a moment as if he were trying to transform his habitual sneer into something like a smile. When he was finished, he said, “Okay, lady. Shoot.”
“You’re a detective.”
“Right.”
“Well, I’m not. I need your advice. Should I go out to the Holiday Inn?”
“Sure. That’s what I’d do. Probably there’s nothing to it, probably it’ll be a waste of time. But that’s what I’d do. I’d ask around, see if anybody remembers this guy, see if anybody saw the kid.”
“Thank you.”
Wolf grinned. “Hey, Artie, you hear that? The lady said thank you!”
“I heard,” the other grunted without lifting his head.
Ellen shook her head bleakly and turned to the entrance of the Yacht Club.
“Mrs. Kennesey.” She turned back. “We already checked in there. Different bartender on duty tonight.”
“Oh. Well … thank you again.”
The two detectives laughed.
CHAPTER 21
Her eyes carefully alert and polite, the woman at the desk at the Holiday Inn listened to Ellen’s story and said she hadn’t been informed of the note found under the pillow. “That doesn’t mean anything, of course,” she added. “I’m sure lots of things happen on the day shift that we don’t hear about.”
Ellen asked if the note might have been kept.
“If it was, it should be in the lost and found locker.” But it wasn’t.
Working at her computer, she confirmed that a David Kennedy had checked in at 12:50 and had asked for a reservation at the Inn in Omaha.
“I booked it myself,” she said, looking up.
“That means you saw him?”
“Yes, it means I saw him, but I’m afraid that’s all it means.”
Ellen showed her the snapshots she’d brought from home, and she shrugged. “It could be him, but I wouldn’t swear to it. By the end of the day it’s all just a blur.” She gave Ellen a wistful little smile, as if apologizing for the fact that Ellen, too, would soon be just a blur.
“Is there anything to indicate he had a child with him?”
After a glance down at the computer screen, she said, “He booked a single, but that doesn’t prove anything.”
“You mean he might have had a child with him.”
“That’s right.”
Ellen sighed wearily. “Do you have any suggestions?”
“Well, I suppose you could try the cocktail lounge. That’s the only place open at that time of night.”
The bartender, a hawk-faced Arab, listened to Ellen’s story with an air of disdain, as if the suggestion that he might remember a customer at this place was a slur on his professionalism. “Where I work before, I know all the faces, all the names. Here,” he said bitterly, “I just pour liquor and make money, no more.”
“Please,” she said, holding out the photo. “It’s very important.”
He snatched it from her hand and took it to a lamp beside the cash register. “No,” he muttered angrily, “no.” He tossed the picture on the bar. “I serve maybe ten, twenty men a night with face like that. All alike. Connie,” he snapped at a passing cocktail waitress. “You look at this face. You see this face last night?”
“It would have been around one o’clock,” Ellen said.
Connie shook her head over the photo. “If he was seven feet tall or wore a patch over one eye, I might remember him. Otherwise, if he just sat here and drank.…” She shrugged and handed it back. “Sorry.”
“Thanks anyway.”
The bartender leered at her triumphantly.
She ordered a scotch on the rocks and slumped back into the tall chair. When the drink arrived, she looked up and found a pleasant-looking elderly gentleman standing behind the next stool, waiting patiently for her attention. A couple inches shorter than Ellen, slender except for a neat little tummy, he reminded her of an amiable old sheep. He seemed vaguely out of place, as though until that moment he’d been in the parlor in his slippers, reading the newspaper with his feet up; he was wearing a shabby old cardigan sweater over a shirt and tie.
“Pardon me for eavesdropping,” he said with a diffident smile, “but may I have a look at your picture?”
“Certainly. Please sit down.”
He set his drink on the bar, climbed up onto the stool, and sat nodding over the photo. “Yes, yes, I think so. He didn’t look so carefree as this, but I believe he and I shared a drink or two last night.”
“Here?”
“Of course.”
“You talked to him?”
The old man returned the picture and smiled gently. “Actually, he did most of the talking.”
“What did he say?”
“Ah,” he said, stroking his chin. “He is …?”
“My husband.”
“Ah. Ah. Then I suppose it’s all right.” He shrugged, absolving himself of the duties of a confidant. “I fear he was a trifle … tipsy. Not at first. At first he seemed quite sober. But after a bit he became, um, expansive.”
“Go on. Please.”
“He talked about a road.”
“A road?”
“He said, ‘There is a certain road.’ ”
“I don’t understand.”
He waggled his head apologetically. “I didn’t either, of course. He said it several times, as if it were a discovery he could hardly bring himself to believe. ‘There is a road, a certain road.…’ But he didn’t explain what he meant.”
“That’s all?”
“Oh no. That was at the end, when he was, ah, fairly well sloshed. Before that, he said … Oh, it was quite a little poem. I couldn’t pretend to be able to repeat it. He said his life had been poured into a mold and that he’d given the mold a twist and the contents had spilled out, all
smashed. He said …” The old man paused, gazing mistily into the distance. “I’m not sure of his words, but the image was of a set of molds, a nest of molds, his at the center. By destroying the mold of his own life, he’d destroyed all the others as well.”
Ellen nodded, her throat tight. “Did he mention … our son?”
“Oh, indeed he did, Mrs.…”
“Kennesey. Ellen Kennesey.”
“How do you do. My name is John Dee. Yes, he mentioned your son—with great emotion, I might add. He said he’d renounced his son along with the rest of his life, but that fate had ruled otherwise. He said that fate had, um, miraculously reunited the two of them. He didn’t elaborate on that, I’m afraid. He took this to mean that, in some mysterious way, their lives were destined to be shaped in a single mold.”
“Shit,” Ellen said. “He’s stolen him.”
John Dee raised his brows curiously. “He’s stolen your son?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. These things can be so … ugly.”
She shakily lit a cigarette and, after a moment’s consideration, realized there really wasn’t any doubt about her next move. “Will you wait for me right here, Mr. Dee? I have to go make a plane reservation.”
“Certainly.”
She took a gulp of scotch and told him to order another round. At a phone in the lobby, she learned she could catch a seven-thirty flight if she left that instant, but that there was another at a quarter to nine; she reserved a seat on the later flight. Returning to her place at the bar, she asked the old man how David had seemed, besides being slightly drunk.
He peered thoughtfully into his drink. “Excited. Perhaps a bit giddy, like a boy just out of school for the summer.”
Ellen winced. “Did he seem … I can’t ask you if he seemed like himself, since you didn’t know him before. But did he seem quite … sane?”
“Oh no,” he answered with a small chuckle. “Not quite sane.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned in his chair and studied her gravely. “Have you ever done an insane thing, Mrs. Kennesey?”